Digital printing systems generally are constructed from two essential components. The first component is a print engine and the second component is a print controller. The print engine and controller units can be developed and implemented independently of one another, or integrated into the product that is ultimately manufactured. In general, the print controller handles communications and interfaces with a host system.
A print controller can also interpret print commands transmitted from the host and translate them into signals required to drive the print engine. Printing functions ranging from color management to duplexing generally depend on the interaction of the print engine and the controller. Digital print systems include, for example, desktop units, copy machines, printers, print-on-demand systems, and so forth.
One of the functions of a print controller is the ability to effectively enable a print stream format. A number of different print stream formats are utilized in the printing arts. A commonly utilized print stream format (also referred to herein as an “imaging data stream”) is the Line Conditioned Data Stream (LCDS), developed by Xerox Corporation of Stamford, Connecticut. LCDS is one type of an imaging data stream that can be utilized to drive, for example production printers and host systems. Unlike page description languages, which create pages from high-level graphical constructs, print command languages such as LCDS contain printer commands interspersed with data and are processed and executed sequentially.
Currently, LCDS imaging models involve monochrome and highlight color. A proprietary digital printing system, for example, for which LCDS was introduced, can define the language that is executable on LPS (Laser Printing System) products. On such products and any true emulations thereof, any specification of a color that utilizes more than one non-monochrome color typically results in error messages displayed to the user of LCDS products, and the request is only rendered using the monochrome ink. No attempt is made to best approximate the intent of the user in the color printing process.
A need therefore exists for improving the color quality output of the LCDS imaging data streams. Such a goal can be accomplished through the application of a unique imaging model, which is disclosed in further detail herein with respect to particular embodiments.